Giving car companies your money (and then modifying your car) is still rewarding car companies for their bad behavior. We really need to stop buying new cars and somehow make it clear that telematics are the reason, but it's never going to happen. Not enough people care, and of those who care, not enough of them care enough to stop buying these cars.
But what's the point if you're just going to use Android Auto or Apple's car-thing instead? You're just letting some other company invade your privacy.
Consent and convenience. When I use google maps, I am trading my privacy for accurate directions and traffic times. When I buy a car that sells my location, and I get nothing in return, I feel like the deal is inequitable.
OsmAnd works fine in Android Auto with WiFi and mobile data turned off. Sygic does too. I believe TomTom also sells navigation apps that will work fine under these conditions.
I use Android Auto mostly because I don't trust manufacturers of car components to maintain their software and to put more than bargain bin SoCs in their infotainment consoles. There's no need for your Android phone to have a connection to the outside world if all you're using it for is locally installed apps.
People who are "pushing an agenda" aren't arguing that there should be no cars ever, anywhere. Cars are the smallest-scale form of long-distance transport, they are unavoidable in low-density areas or for services that requires complete flexibility. All the agenda-pushers I've seen in real life are just saying that there's better options within cities, at least for a lot of people. Most of the time, most people only move within their cities, myself included. If transit within my city was in any way adequate, I would choose it over the car. I could cover those rare out-of-city edge cases with rentals or train travel.
Besides, it's not even the same in Europe. In a few countries, maybe, but in the majority the inter-city transit or transit within small towns is not even in the same universe as what's available in most of the US.
A massive chunk (if not majority?) of those top 20 metro areas are largely car dependent for most of their populations. Large areas don't have any public transit at all, and the rest is often designed to be actively hostile to pedestrians.
Try living without a car in these places, all in the 4th largest MSA.
And even in most of those metros (OK. Leave aside Manhattan), not having a car tends to imply a lot of lifestyle choices in terms of activities, visiting friends outside of the metro, etc.
There are certainly people who are OK with living like they did in their urban school for a few years after graduation. But that's not a long-term solution for most people.
NYC is the absolute best case in the US, if you're talking about the ability to exist without a car. It's not that no one talks about those millions of households, it's that they are all concentrated on a few standout islands (literally!) in a sea of the nearly identical car-only supermajority of cities. It's the exception to all exceptions.
Most people live in cities, but the vast majority of American cities do not approach even 10% of the quality and availability of transit in NYC. That's why I said that NYC is a massive outlier among the rest of the US.
I don’t think the average city is a useful comparison when more people live in larger cities which tend to have better mass transit options.
People live car free in a wide range of cities, it’s more convenient for more people in NYC thus the large percentage of people doing so, but the percentage is rarely zero.
It’s not useful if you generally fly most places you travel to. An of course if you’re going months-years without using a car then renting becomes relatively more convenient.
Not possible when things are 10+ mile apart and a general grocery run takes 3+ hours and you can't carry more than a backpack, so you have to do it multiple times a week.
The US is ripe for an e-bike revolution. The distances, the wide roads with plenty of room for bike lanes, and the revulsion against things like Flock...
Unfortunately it's as likely as this being the year of the Linux desktop because Windows 11.
Meanwhile a few months back I watched a pickup swerve towards a bicyclist. USA on the average is hostile to anything non-car in a way that is hard to even comprehend.
The Chat Control problem isn't nearly as final as some news sources try to brand it. They were running up against deadlines and submitted their work knowing statistically their proposal would get shot down based on existing voting rounds.
I, too, would rather see this bullshit die in committee before reaching the next stage, but this bullshit can still be stopped.
In the EU, eCall is mandatory and disabling it fails most roadworthiness checks and voids most insurance policies, so it doesn't help much.
Also, while the EU does (for now) have stronger privacy protections for citizens against corporate interests, the opposite is true in most EU countries for Government surveillance.
While eCall has some weak privacy protections (it's open to all the standard cellular network surveillance lawful in each country), it also means you cannot disable the vehicle's modem in most (maybe all) EU countries with failing roadworthiness checks and insurance policies.
eCall mustn't be active until an accident occurs. The lawful interception lobby tried hard to turn every car into a free data point they could sell to the government, but their efforts have failed.
Last I heard they've shifted their efforts to making remote activation of on-board cameras part of the 5/6G smart car bullshit (which will of course be part of road safety requirments not long after).
Annex VII only rules out connecting to the PSAP/112 side, not routine network attaches. To detect faults in the “means of communication”, the IVS has to verify that the SIM, baseband and RF path are actually usable, and you can’t test that without a network attach.
In practice that’s what all current eCall implementations do. The modem attaches to the cellular network at each ignition so it can confirm it’s capable of placing an eCall. If you block the modem or antenna, the IVS fails its self-test and the vehicle is no longer roadworthy.
Does that mean the modem used for eCall is the same that is used to transmit telemetry? Because that's a level of shitty I hadn't even considered. That said, it would go against the spirit of the law as I read it.
There are always workarounds, of course, but that does pose an annoying problem to patch.
Yes, unfortunately in all modern calls there's a single Telematics Control Unit with a modem, GPS/GNSS, eCall (where required) and whatever OEM telemetry stack.
Like you say, there are always workarounds, but none that the home-gamer can safely or legally modify without taking eCall out of compliance.
There are standalone eCall units for retrofitting, e.g. [1] and likely soon more since 2G/3G gets phased out. Presumably you could disable the manufacturer’s built-in system and use standalone system instead?
